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I've been in a dilemma about whether or not to stay with Windows 8 or go back to Windows 7. It then occurred to me, why not just use Linux as my main OS? I don't really game a whole lot anymore and a lot of devs are supposedly shifting to Linux.

My question is two part: How many of you use Linux as your main OS and what distro? Ubuntu and Mint seem like the best right now. What is wants is something that does NOT look like Windows.

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Well, it's a personal choice I would think. Recently I tried Mint 14 RC x64 and it was a very stable and fast OS. If you go Mint 14 RC x64, you will have to implement a x86 program fix, or if you go x86, then you may want to implement the PAE kernel if you have more then 4gigs ram. Not sure if they already have it implemented or not in the x86 release. But I personally do not care for Debian/Ubuntu OSes. But I think the majority of people switching would love it. But it is sort of Windows-like.

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[quote name='patseguin' timestamp='1353440938' post='595337178']I've been in a dilemma about whether or not to stay with Windows 8 or go back to Windows 7. It then occurred to me, why not just use Linux as my main OS? I don't really game a whole lot anymore and a lot of devs are supposedly shifting to Linux.[/quote]Windows had worse releases than Windows 8 and kept its predominance just fine. If Windows 8 doesn't succeed, people will just stay with Windows 7 for the next few years, there's no "shift to Linux", never was, never will be (at least in the foreseeable future).

If you really must use Linux though, I suggest Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop.

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[quote name='patseguin' timestamp='1353440938' post='595337178']
I've been in a dilemma about whether or not to stay with Windows 8 or go back to Windows 7. It then occurred to me, why not just use Linux as my main OS? I don't really game a whole lot anymore and a lot of devs are supposedly shifting to Linux.

My question is two part: How many of you use Linux as your main OS and what distro? Ubuntu and Mint seem like the best right now. What is wants is something that does NOT look like Windows.
[/quote]

I use Linux (Ubuntu, Centos, Linux Mint) in a Virtual Machine such as VirtualBox which is free, it allows you to run Linux at the same time as Windows. If all you want to do is have a different looking windows you can try RainMeter and Samurize, they can radically change the look of Windows to where you can't even notice it's windows anymore.

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I use Mint and WIndows 7. I've been a linux user for a long time, but only for work and development. The desktop experience still sucks in comparison to Mac OS or WIndows as it's full of bugs, lacks polish and lacks consistency. There's like a million different desktop environments for christ sakes (gnome, kde, lxde, unity etc...I'd recommend using Cinnammon or Gnome Shell with whatever distro you decide to try. Those are my favorites.

Bottom line, try using a distro in VMWare or virtualbox and see what you think.

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Well, I'm in the position of having 2 256GB SSD's so I could set up a dual boot. Sounds like Linux Mint x64 is worth checking out since I have 24GB of RAM. I an 100% see what Dr_Asik is saying though. I had just wondered if Linux could overtake Windows as a main desktop OS.

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you have 24GB of RAM?
Dude just install grub or grub4dos on a USB, copy the extracted ISO files of the distro you want to try there and modify GRUB's bootloader to load the ISO files in memory and give it a try.

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Devs are moving to Linux [i]based [/i]operating systems, like Android. Chrome OS is starting to get more popular as well, but there still hasn't been a great push for a desktop Linux OS. Even if Steam goes over, it will probably be some Linux based OS dedicated to gaming that happens to be compatible with Ubuntu and not much else.

As for using it, an OS is an OS. They're all different, but they all do the same things. The real issue is the software that is compatible, although to be honest it makes more sense to run Windows as the main OS and VM into a Linux environment.

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Well I installed Linux mint on one of my ssd's. when done, I instead of getting a boot loader for wi 8 or Linux it went straight to Linux. I entered my username and password and it said I would log in in 5 seconds. This was just an and less loop and I never got into Mint.

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[quote name='patseguin' timestamp='1353445936' post='595337400']
Well I installed Linux mint on one of my ssd's. when done, I instead of getting a boot loader for wi 8 or Linux it went straight to Linux. I entered my username and password and it said I would log in in 5 seconds. This was just an and less loop and I never got into Mint.
[/quote]

Welcome to the wonderful world of dual booting Windows and Linux.

Seriously, this is why every says VMing in is the way to go.

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Although I'm a Debian user, I definitely recommend installing Ubuntu 12.04 if you are a new Linux user. Ubuntu is probably the best supported consumer-oriented distro, and the latest long term support release, 12.04, is fast and super stable.

My only other recommendation is not to approach learning Linux by comparing it to the way things work in Windows. It is not Windows. Many things work differently, and that's necessarily not a bad thing. It will just take some time to get familiar with. The Ubuntu forums and wiki are also an excellent source of information when you need to solve problems or learn how things work. The few Linux users who frequent Neowin are be happy to help you as well (or, at least, I am).

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[quote name='patseguin' timestamp='1353445936' post='595337400']
Well I installed Linux mint on one of my ssd's. when done, I instead of getting a boot loader for wi 8 or Linux it went straight to Linux. I entered my username and password and it said I would log in in 5 seconds. This was just an and less loop and I never got into Mint.
[/quote]

You need to change your boot order. In your BIOS, select the drive you installed Mint on and set it as the primary boot device. You can set it as secondary if your primary is your DVD/CD drive, save and reboot. You should see your boot menu.

[quote name='threetonesun' timestamp='1353446279' post='595337416']
Welcome to the wonderful world of dual booting Windows and Linux.

Seriously, this is why every says VMing in is the way to go.
[/quote]

It's not Linux's fault. It's the way he installed it. It helps if people know how to use GRUB and what drive to install the boot loader to.

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I've been playing with Elementary ([url="http://www.elementaryos.org"]www.elementaryos.org[/url]). It's still in Beta, but perfectly usable in my limited experience. It's Ubuntu-based and it's beautiful. Stock Ubuntu is a really good distro, too, which is what I was playing with before I found out about Elementary.

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I recommend Ubuntu 12.04 if you want something stable and pleasant to use. Like you, I wanted something completely different than the Windows user experience but I also wanted something well-supported and relatively ubiquitous. I'm a professional developer, and I'm slowly moving from Windows to Linux. Everyone I work with daily used to code in C# and C++ on Visual Studio, but given Microsoft's silence last year on .NET support moving forward, and the speed at which Microsoft now deprecates their tools and technologies (WPF, EF, LINQ to SQL, etc.) many of us have decided on a new approach using open-source tools that we could bring in-house and maintain ourselves if necessary.

CherryPy and Python 3 is replacing ASP.NET, nginx is replacing IIS, C++ (using gcc) is now used for our speed-critical components, and Unity 3D remains as our game engine (since it now supports deployment to Linux). The Unity 3D editor runs fairly well in a VM, but there are several people working on making it work under WINE.

Linux on the desktop, Android on the mobile devices, Ouya for the gaming console... This is exactly what Microsoft feared, but they're late to the party. Kind of like how they were shown Wii-like hardware before there was a Wii, and they scoffed at it. It wasn't until the Wii became popular that they scrambled to release Kinect. Microsoft seems more interested in chasing the market than in innovating these days, which is sad actually. Microsoft R&D has some really cool projects, but none of them ever seem to see the light of day in mainstream releases.

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[quote name='patseguin' timestamp='1353440938' post='595337178']
My question is two part: How many of you use Linux as your main OS and what distro? Ubuntu and Mint seem like the best right now. What is wants is something that does NOT look like Windows.
[/quote]
not alot of people here use linux. but it is not about prevalence, it is about usability.
I 'd recommend gnome, KDE, Cinnamon and unity as DE.choice of DE is very important prior to choosing a distro.
Mint is very stable and really good.If I can add another rising distro: [url="http://www.google.com.eg/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=Mageia&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageia.org%2F&ei=PxesULyqJcrasgaEvoHQDw&usg=AFQjCNFoZrsfE5i1hzLZA6EfzNlC9CkzlA"]Mageia[/url]
You should just start using as a new adventure that is worth taking.and believe me, it is worth it.

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Well, I have Mint installed in a VMWare Box. Linux is very difficult to install driver or software on. I had to Google command line commends to ge the nVidia drivers and even that failed somehow because I am now stuck on 640 X 480. I also downloaded Chrome and I found out you can't just double click on a downloaded file to install it. It still seems very advanced and only for the very computer savvy, nowhere near ready for prime time.